NESTLED in the heart of Washington, DC, a short distance from the White House, sits an oasis of calm. For now. It is the encampment at George Washington University (GWU) where, as at other college campuses across the country, students are protesting against Israel’s genocidal assault on Palestinians in Gaza and calling on their universities to divest from Israel and from the companies that profit there. The GWU encampment also includes students from six other universities in the region.

Scattered among the brightly coloured pup tents are a library, an arts supply table and a large medical tent. In the centre of the occupation is a white board advertising the day’s events.

The statue of George Washington has been draped with a keffiyeh, covered in pro-Palestine stickers and daubed with slogans decrying imperialism, genocide and warmongering. Television crews are parked permanently under shady trees waiting for something to happen. 

“The George Washington Police Department requested that the DC police come and clear this encampment and the DC police refused to do so,” said a student from Georgetown University I spoke to at the encampment, wearing a keffiyeh and a star of David pendant and who gave her name only as “Miriam.”

That restraint may not last as pressure mounts on President Joe Biden and the Democratic Party to restore order on university campuses as they try to paint Donald Trump, Biden’s Republican opponent in the presidential race, as the agent of chaos. 

Anxiety is also mounting about potential unrest at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in August, the site of tumult when it was held there in 1968. At that time, opposition to US involvement in the Vietnam war was the chief issue that ignited the protests.

Biden condemned the current student protests in a speech last week that many interpreted as a political tactic. The media, along with leaders in both the Republican and Democratic parties, continue falsely to paint the protests as pro-Hamas and anti-semitic despite ample evidence that the encampments are non-violent and include many Jewish students.

“All of these claims are diversion tactics,” Miriam said. “They are meant to take the focus away from the genocide in Gaza.”

Violent scenes last week at University of California, Los Angeles, where students were assailed first by a zionist mob hurling fireworks and metal barricades and the next day by police firing stun grenades and rubber bullets, sent shockwaves across the country.

Those events also prompted the largest union representing university workers to consider strike action in protest at the UCLA administration’s failure to protect its students.

“Universities across the country would rather actively endanger their students, have their students brutalised by cops, than divest from genocide,” said Miriam. 

Supportive faculty members, defying the hard-line tactics of their university administrations, have gone to the encampments and occupations to bear witness to the police brutality. Some have instead become caught up in it.

“I’m a professor! I’m a professor!” screamed Caroline Fohlin, a professor of economics at Emory university in Georgia, as she lay with her face pressed to the concrete. She had been thrown to the ground by a police officer who proceeded to handcuff her after she asked why her students were being arrested.

Sami Schalk, an African-American professor of gender studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, was placed in a choke hold by police while visiting the student encampment there. She ended up in hospital. “I’ve been told to return to the hospital if certain things happen which might be signs of internal damage, esp from the strangulation,” Schalk reported later on X.

At Princeton University, where students took over Clio Hall, university vice-president Rochelle Calhoun, who was not present during the occupation, described the student actions as “threatening” and “abusive” in a letter to the Princeton community.

But Ruha Benjamin, a professor of African-American studies at Princeton and a faculty observer of the Clio Hall student takeover, condemned Calhoun for effectively reframing “the peaceful sit-in in a misleading and even inflammatory way.” In a public statement also signed by other faculty, Benjamin noted that “No-one yelled. No-one made threats.”

While Biden may be worried that appearing weak on student unrest could lose him votes in November, his stubborn refusal to abandon Israel may cost him the youth vote instead. Young people “are really fed up at this point with the Democratic Party, with Biden,” Miriam, the Georgetown University student, said. “Change is not going to come through the ballot box.” 

Instead, echoing the sentiment of student protesters of the 1960s, she added: “We have to liberate ourselves. We are planting those seeds for revolutionary change here.”

Linda Pentz Gunter is a writer based in Takoma Park, Maryland.